Pontifications on Poison

Being some ramblings on events associated with poisonous plants.

Monday 12th March 2012

Confusion over common names for plants caused me some
excitement for a little while after one of my Google alerts took
me to this item,
‘Biocontrol agents make their mark’ in Farmers Weekly.

The article is about the possibility that biological control
agents, which have been used for many years in controlled
environments like greenhouses, may be about to enter the world
of arable farming. One reason for this is that increasing
regulation and pressure from supermarkets is making chemical
controls more difficult and costly to use.

The piece goes on to describe one product that attacks fungi
and says that its use for horticulture may be about to extend to
potatoes because so many problems with potatoes are fungal in
origin.

I’m giving that background to explain why I didn’t
immediately see something was wrong when the piece turned its
attention to another biocontrol known as reysa and extracted,
according to Farmers Weekly, from giant hogweed.

I’ve
written before about the research suggesting that plants
produce furocoumarins to combat attacks from a root fungus so
seeing giant hogweed mentioned in connection with fungal control
sounded perfectly plausible.

My mind was already starting to think about the problems that
would arise from growing giant hogweed commercially to extract
the biocontrol even as I searched for more information on raysa.
I immediately decided that there would be enough for my usual
length of blog entry in considering all the aspects involved.
But those thoughts came to an abrupt end when I found that ‘raysa’
is a name given to an extract of Reynoutria sachalinensis, known
as giant knotweed.

If you followed the link, above, you may be wondering what I
was on about. I posted a comment to Farmers Weekly and, though
it doesn’t appear on the page, they did get it because the
article has been altered to read ‘giant knotweed’.

There is no way anyone could confuse Fallopia japonica,
Reynoutria sachalinensis and
Heracleum mantegazzianum but you can easily see how
confusion can arise between Japanese knotweed, giant knotweed
and giant hogweed can occur. That’s why you sometimes read about
giant hogweed being capable of breaking through concrete or
Japanese knotweed causing skin burns.

By coincidence, I also read
this piece from the Telegraph about the problems with
spelling the botanical names of plants. It just goes to show
there are always two ways of looking at things.